My mechanical keyboard

Mar 21, 2015,
Categories: hardware,keyboards

You spend all your waking time at a keyboard. This blog post is about
keyboards, and can be summarized as: Buy quality, cry once.

I spend a lot of time typing on a keyboard, yet I have never looked
into what keyboard would be best for me. There are natural keyboards
and kinesis keyboards that people speak well of, but I
spend a lot of time typing on laptops and don’t want a completely
different setup for laptop and desktop.

I had the same concern before switching to Dvorak back when
I was a consultant (thus often using other peoples managed machines),
but happily switched after verifying that even on a locked down
Windows machine as a non-admin user I could select Dvorak. Also there
are adapters from Dvorak to Qwerty that I could use in
extremely locked down environments such as the CCIE lab (they required
a doctors note though, long story).

So it would have to be a keyboard that looks like a normal
one. Preferably with Dvorak on the keycaps. It seems that mechanical
keyboards are all the rage, so I thought I’d give that a go.

I ended up buying a 88 key Cherry MX brown-based keyboard from WASD
Keyboards, with Dvorak plus some custom keys. Some reasons:

DasKeyboard has a big tacky logo, while WASD
Keyboards are just the keyboard without the extra yuck.

Cherry MX blue get better reviews, but are not recommended for open
offices for sound reasons.

I thought I wouldn’t notice that it’s better, that it would only feel
better after a day at the keyboard. Not that I have a problem with
tiring out from typing, but presumably a better keyboard is a better
keyboard for this. What instead happened was that as soon as I started
typing I noticed that it’s much more comfortable. It just feels
better.

I’ve seen several reviews of keyboards on YouTube, and not knowing
what’s better about a better keyboard I found them all to be too
subjective to be useful. Having used one for a few weeks let me add my
equally useless review: It’s great. I love it.

Drawbacks of this keyboard:

I missed the numpad more than i thought, so I’m buying a 105 key
one, and am picking Cherry MX blue this time. If it’s too loud for
the office I’ll have that one at home.

Update: I bought another one with a numpad. I’ve realized I don’t
actually care about the numpad now.

No built-in USB hub. That would’ve been nice to have. But I’ve only
missed it when I’ve plugged it into a Raspberry Pi with a limited
number of USB ports.

The USB cable isn’t snapped in place, so if you’re someone that
tends to move your keyboard around that may put some stress on the
USB connector in the keyboard or its cable.